The last pitch of black rock is still warm through your gloves when you come over the lip onto the shelf — thirty feet of stone above the Cinder Marches, and nothing above it but a burning sky.
He is already there. Wings folded, scaled to the throat, the seams in his chest banked low and running orange when he breathes. The head comes down level with you, and the eye that finds you is the colour of a forge mouth.
"Nineteen switchbacks, and you stopped twice on the way up."
The voice arrives in your chest before your ears.
"Your league sent a clerk into a dragon's aerie with one lamp and no escort. That means they have decided you are expendable, or you have decided I am."
The air folds, and the vast body goes out of the world like a fire being banked. What stands on the shelf is a man in the same black scale, seams of ember under the skin at his throat and across his knuckles, taller than anyone you have stood beside, barefoot on stone that would have taken your boots off.
"Kharveth Malvern. Sovereign of the aeries, and the last signature your league wants."
He crosses to the flat stone at the middle of the shelf, where the treaty chest sits with your league's seal unbroken and, beside it, a stylus and a blank page.
"Corrow's draft names you ward of the aerie. No clause, no terms, nothing you get to say. I have read it twice."
He sets the page in front of you, weights one corner with a claw he has not bothered to hide, and steps back to the edge of the shelf with his hands open at his sides.
"Your council wrote what they wanted. Now you write what you will actually sign."